en eee ee ee ee ee Cee. eer ae Se ae 
434 
three years later Mr. Thomas Routledge introduced esparto grass into 
~ England. The simultaneous introduction of wood and grass furnished 
the first important sources of raw material for paper making and pro- 
vided the first evidence that perennial grasses are suitable for paper 
stock.? 
It is interesting to note the direction which search for suitable paper 
material was taking when the adaptability of wood for this purpose was 
first discovered and also to predict the lines of future inquiry when wood 
no longer meets the demand. When, in 1861, all import duties in Great 
Britain were repealed, the resulting establishment of a vast number of 
weekly and daily papers and journals created so great a demand for 
paper and paper pulp that manufacturers were forced to supplement 
the imported Spanish and North African esparto grass with the cereal 
straws, but even these proved insufficient to meet the requirements and, 
as the. prosperity of English paper mills appeared to be at stake, the 
demand seemed justified that the Indian bamboo forests be thrown open 
to private enterprise; accordingly, Mr. Thomas Routledge, a prominent 
paper manufacturer of Sunderland to whom the introduction of esparto 
is due, sent investigators to India to study the problem in that country. 
However, about this time the manufacture of paper stock from spruce 
timber had been developed on the Continent, particularly in Germany and 
Sweden, and supplies of this new material from those countries brought 
the much-needed relief; nevertheless, experiments were carried far 
enough to demonstrate that bamboo fiber is much superior to spruce 
for paper stock and there seems but little doubt that the bamboo-paper 
question eventually will be reopened. 
In America the evolution of raw material for paper making followed 
somewhat different lines. The transition from rags to wood was direct 
and was later followed by the use of straw in those regions far removed 
from the spruce forests. No recourse to perennial grasses or bamboo 
has thus far been necessary. 
For half a century wood-pulp has met the rapidly increasing demand 
for paper stock. However, we are now confronted with the fact that 
the supply of this material will soon be exhausted, so that we are afforded 
a curious example of the manner in which the development of an industry 
sometimes brings one back to the conditions of the beginning, although 
the new point reached, owing to the persistence of scientific inquiry which 
was undertaken regardless of an utter lack of apparent practical benefit, 
is on a much higher plane. 
Until wood-pulp had been proven to be suitable for paper stock, the 
world’s supply of fibrous material was divided between the textile and 
paper industries, one being complementary to the other. Such vegetable 
‘2s fibers of cotton and flax in the form of cotton and linen rags have already 
undergone purification and have been subjected to processes of manufacture, they 
can not, strictly speaking, be considered as raw materials, 
